Popular Literature

When co-workers Mira and Jake miss their flight home from Paris to New York, they’ll spend the next 24 hours unwittingly stuck together in the city of love.

Between 1994 and 1997, James Brown's loaded magazine became the the must-buy and must-be-in publication of the decade. It won every award going, year after year, and came to define not only its audience but also a generation. Bright, loud, funny, provocative, ambitious and careless, loaded was read from the barracks of Afghanistan to the England dressing room at Euro '96. It captured a hedonistic lifestyle of alcohol, cocaine and more. The last great hurrah before the end of the century.

What is it like to grow up Aboriginal in Australia? This anthology, compiled by award-winning author Anita Heiss, showcases many diverse voices, experiences and stories in order to answer that question. Accounts from well-known authors and high-profile identities sit alongside those from newly discovered writers of all ages. All of the contributors speak from the heart - sometimes calling for empathy, oftentimes challenging stereotypes, always demanding respect.

In 1958, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was published in the United States to immediate controversy and best-sellerdom. More than 60 years later, this phenomenal novel generates as much buzz as it did when originally published. Central to countless issues at the forefront of our national discourse - art and politics, race and whiteness, gender and power, sexual trauma - Lolita lives on, in an afterlife as blinding as a supernova.

Humor is the most celebrated of all Jewish responses to modernity. In this book, Ruth Wisse evokes and applauds the genius of spontaneous Jewish joking - as well as the brilliance of comic masterworks by writers like Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Philip Roth. At the same time, Wisse draws attention to the precarious conditions that call Jewish humor into being - and the price it may exact from its practitioners and audience.

Stella’s life hasn’t quite gone to plan. She imagined that, at forty, she’d be settled with a supportive husband, two kids and a dog. Instead, she’s single and living at home with her mum, Bonnie, and grandmother, Florence. She passes the evenings in her childhood bedroom, obsessively searching for the perfect sperm donor. Unbeknownst to Stella is that Bonnie and Florence both also had difficult journeys to motherhood. And now that they’re writing down their stories for Stella’s unborn child, the truth about their family is becoming harder to conceal.

In this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to Twin Peaks, Britney Spears, and Serial, illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as props to bolster men’s stories. Smart and accessible, thoughtful and heartfelt, Bolin investigates the implications of our cultural fixations, and her own role as a consumer and creator.

This small volume completes the translation of Karel Erben’s A Hundred Genuine Popular Slavonie Fairy Stories. The first volume, Segnius Irritant, maps out, so to say, the primitive folklore weather myth of which nearly the whole of the succeeding 92 stories are wholly or in part reproductions.

Early on July 16, 1945, Joshua Wheeler's great grandfather awoke to a flash, and then a long rumble: the world's first atomic blast filled the horizon north of his ranch in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Out on the range, the cattle had been bleached white by the fallout. Acid West, Wheeler's stunning debut collection of essays, is full of these mutated cows: vestiges of the Old West that have been transformed, suddenly and irrevocably, by innovation. Traversing the New Mexico landscape, Wheeler excavates and reexamines these oddities.

Optics can make or break an election. Everything Mark knows about politics, he learned from his father, the Congressman who still pretends he has a daughter and not a son. Mark has promised to keep his past hidden and pretend to be the cis guy everyone assumes he is. But when he sees a manipulatively charming candidate for student body president inflame dangerous rhetoric, Mark risks his low profile to become a political challenger. The problem? No one really knows Mark. He didn’t grow up in this town, and his few friends are all nerds.

Meet Fisher Bas: a 12-year-old, growth-stunted, geeky science genius who is the son of Nobel Prize–winning parents. Despite his outsized IQ, Fisher is far from the most popular kid in his middle school — he’s actually tormented daily by overgrown goons he calls the Vikings. Holed up in his home lab over a long weekend, Fisher uses his mother’s revolutionary Advanced Growth Hormone to clone himself.

Paloma has finally settled in at her new school with her new friends. Her mom is actually talking to her about the psychic abilities that run in their family. And her little sister has been maybe slightly less annoying than usual. Everything is going great... until Rafaela de la Cruz comes to town. Rafaela is part of a family of “ghost hunters” with their own reality show—and Paloma’s newest classmate. Paloma’s family has always dismissed the de la Cruzes as having no real psychic abilities, but that hasn’t kept the show from becoming a hit. Suddenly, Paloma’s seances are old news.

Ever since its "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" commercials from the 1970s, Coca-Cola has billed itself as the world's beverage, uniting all colors and cultures in a mutual love of its caramel-sweet sugar water. The formula has worked incredibly well, making it one of the most profitable companies on the planet and Coca-Cola the world's second-most-recognized word after hello.

budding butch in the Brylcreem era, Lorraine "Lon" Harris fantasizes about a South Pacific island full of women, where everyone will be free and accepting, and she'll never have to wear an eyelet blouse again. Spurned by her high school English teacher, Lon turns to a new friend, the brash, purple-haired Violet, who draws Lon into the lesbian underworld of suburban Los Angeles, to the sordid 28 Percent Club, a private bar where those with "contaminated passions" cling to each other.

Designated the “Queen of Lesbian Pulp” for her series of landmark novels beginning in 1957, Ann Bannon defined lesbian fiction for the pre-Stonewall generation. Following the release of Cleis Press's new editions of Beebo Brinker and Odd Girl Out, Women in the Shadows finds Laura in love among the lesbian bohemia of Greenwich Village. This edition features a new introduction by the author.

Ann Bannon was designated the “Queen of Lesbian Pulp” for authoring several landmark novels in the ’50s. Unlike many writers of the period, however, Bannon broke through the shame and isolation typically portrayed in lesbian pulps, offering instead characters who embraced their sexuality. With Beebo Brinker, Bannon introduces a butch 17-year-old farm girl newly arrived in Beat-era Greenwich Village.

EU PRECISO FAZER UMA CONFISSÃO: nunca foi fácil ser eu. Você pode até pensar, com um quê de impaciência e uma boa dose de deboche (e já digo logo que entendo super, tá?): "Ah! Ser loira, popular, bonita, rica e invejada é realmente péssimo! Ter tudo o que deseja e ainda ser o crush de dez entre dez garotos é, com toda certeza, um martírio... Viajar para o exterior duas vezes por ano e ficar nos melhores hotéis é, sem sombra de dúvida, uma coisa pavorosa. Ó-meu-Deus--coi-ta-di-nha!" Já disse, eu entendo que você pense assim.

Maddie tries to be nice to everyone. Even weird, chicken-obsessed Tahlia. But she’d way prefer to hang out with the cool K-girls at school. The only problem is that they don’t seem interested in her anymore. And at Year 6 camp, Maddie has a decision to make: How far will she go to be popular? Will she be able to live with the guilt when she finally has everything she’s been hoping for?

Twenty-five years ago, a group of ninth-graders produced a Saturday Night Live-style videotape to cheer up their ailing friend. The show's running time was only 90 minutes, but it had a lasting impact: Becca laughed her way through recovery, and the group - Jordana, Seth, Holly, and Lex - became her supporting cast for life. On the silver anniversary of Becca Night Live, the friends reunite over the Fourth of July to celebrate Becca's good health - but nothing goes as planned. The happy holiday-card facades everyone's been hiding behind quickly crumble.

Maddie is beyond done with her cousin Genesis' entitled and shallow entourage. Genesis is so over Miami's predictable social scene, with its velvet ropes, petty power plays, and backstabbing boyfriends. While Maddie craves family time for spring break, Genesis seeks novelty - like a last-minute getaway to an untouched beach in Colombia. And when Genesis wants something, it happens. But paradise has its price.